27. Orion
— ? —
Orion
“I want to go somewhere,” I said. “Just the three of us. A week away from everything.”
Gianna looked up from the book she was reading. Alex was on his play mat, batting at the dangling toys with increasing coordination. Five months old and already determined to grab everything within reach.
He’d inherited that from his mother, I was pretty sure. That determination. That refusal to let anything stay out of his grasp.
“Anywhere,” I continued. “You pick. Paris. The Maldives. That resort in Fiji you bookmarked last year.”
She was quiet for a moment. I watched her think about it. The options, the possibilities, all the places my money could take us.
“Port Aransas,” she said.
I blinked. “The beach town?”
“There’s a cottage there. Right on the dunes. Nothing fancy.” She set down her book. “Daisy and I went there at nineteen. Two hundred dollars between us. A borrowed car. We ate hot dogs and built sandcastles and stayed up all night talking about what we wanted our lives to be.”
“And?”
“And it was the best week of my life. Until you.”
The casual way she said it like I was just a fact of her life, like being with me had been happiness, made my chest ache.
“Until me,” I repeated.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late. It’s already there. Growing. Taking up valuable real estate.”
She threw a pillow at me. I caught it, grinning.
I chartered the jet anyway, because traveling with a baby was easier that way, but I let her choose the house. Three bedrooms, a porch overlooking the dunes. The kind of place that looked like it had been standing since before either of us was born, weathered and salt-stained and perfect.
We spent a week doing nothing.
Building sandcastles. Watching Alex see the ocean for the first time, the way his eyes went wide at the endless blue, the way he laughed when the waves touched his feet. Cooking simple dinners together in the tiny kitchen. Falling asleep to the sound of waves.
The first batch of grits came out like wallpaper paste. So did the second. Gianna took over on the third attempt while I watched with what I hoped was a supportive expression.
“You run a billion-dollar company,” she said, scraping the pan. “How have you never learned to cook grits?”
“I have people for that.”
“You have people for grits.”
“Had. Past tense. Apparently now I have to learn to make my own grits like some kind of peasant. My savings aren’t increasing anymore.”
“The horror.”
“I know. It’s been very humbling.”
“And yet here we are. On a vacation.”
She laughed and the sound of it was worth every ruined pot of grits I’d ever make.
Second-to-last night, we sat on the porch after Alex was down. Watching the stars come out over the water.
“I could give you an island,” I said. “A yacht. A villa in Tuscany.”
“Of course, you can.”
“But you picked this.”
She leaned into me, her head on my shoulder. “This is what happy feels like, Orion. I didn’t need an island. I needed you to be here. Not thinking about work.”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m so here I’ve forgotten what my email inbox looks like.”
“That might actually be concerning.”
“Robertson is handling it. Probably. Unless the building has burned down.”
“Would you care if it had?”
I thought about it. “I’d care in an abstract, ‘that’s unfortunate’ kind of way. But not enough to leave this porch.”
She turned her head and pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “Good answer.”
I wrapped my arm around her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
My phone rang inside the house. I didn’t move.
It rang again. Then hers rang, and she pulled it out of her pocket and checked the screen.
“It’s Maddie,” she said.
Maddie wouldn’t call at this hour unless it was important. Gianna answered, listened for a moment, and handed the phone to me without a word.
“The board meets in three weeks,” my mother said without preamble. “I’m stepping back. I’ll still sit on the board, but I’m done running this place day to day. Those bastards… Anyway, they want a name for who runs it next, and I told them it wasn’t mine to give.”
I looked at my wife. She’d heard every word. My mother had never lowered her voice for anyone.
“Not now, Mom.”
I hung up. Gianna was watching me. That sharp focus she got when the pieces fell into place.
“Three weeks,” she said. “They set a date. And you weren’t going to tell me.”
The waves crashed against the shore. The stars wheeled overhead and I told her the truth.
“It’s not mine to bring up.”
“Orion.”
“It’s been yours since that kitchen. I wasn’t going to be the one who asked.”
She was quiet for a long time. The Gulf kept coming in.
“Ask me anyway.”
I didn’t.